Tag: Persuasion Techniques
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How Innocence and Fresh Perspective Can Drive Business Success
A vice president once patted me on the head, literally, physically, on my actual head, and told me I was “charmingly naive” for suggesting we treat our customers like they had functioning brains. This was in a conference room with bad fluorescent lighting and a potted plant that had clearly given up on life. I…
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How Comparisons Can Make Your Arguments Unassailable
An old man storms into his doctor’s office, furious. “Doc, my new twenty-two-year-old wife is pregnant. You performed my vasectomy thirty years ago, and I want to know what the hell you’re going to do about it.” The doctor doesn’t flinch. “Let me tell you a story. A hunter once left the house and accidentally…
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The One Trait All Readers Share: Leverage It for Maximum Relevance
It doesn’t matter if you write about minimalism or motorcycles. If you have an audience, it contains three concentric circles: 1. People who read your content. 2. People who read and share your content. 3. People who take action on the advice in your content. These aren’t separate tribes. They overlap. The person who implements…
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Hooks and Techniques That Keep Audiences Captivated From Start to Finish
Think back to the last time you sat through a string of presentations, a conference, a webinar, an all-hands meeting where the agenda ran long and the coffee ran out. Some sessions flew by. Others immediately triggered the thought: “Now’s a good time to go to the bathroom and get a snack.” You know the…
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Harness the Power of High Expectations in Your Marketing Strategy
The standard advice is tidy and familiar: lower your expectations so you won’t be disappointed. Detach from outcomes. Want less, suffer less. It’s not wrong, exactly. But it’s incomplete. Because while you’re busy letting go of expectations, you might also be letting go of the very energy that drives excellent work. The emotional truth is…
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Harness Figurative Language to Supercharge Your Promotional Impact
In 1980, a man walked into Congress asking for $1.2 billion. He was the CEO of a failing automaker. The word everyone was using for what he wanted was bailout, and “bailout” was polling somewhere between “tooth extraction” and “root canal” in the court of public opinion. He didn’t get the money by asking for…
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Four Organic Principles for Compassionate Promotion
I have a confession. I keep going back to a soap company that doesn’t deserve me. Five years ago, I found them online. Rare scents. Natural ingredients. Prices that didn’t insult my intelligence. I placed an order and entered my email address to “confirm my purchase.” You know what happened next. Within days, my inbox…
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Five Clever Techniques for Weaving Metaphor Into Magnetic Writing
I was halfway through a perfectly fine article when I swapped the headline for a metaphor and watched the click-through rate double overnight. Same article. Same audience. One image changed everything. That’s when I stopped thinking of metaphors as literary garnish and started treating them as load-bearing walls. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most content is…
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Five Essential Elements Every Compelling Marketing Narrative Requires
My grandmother told stories the way some people cook, without a recipe, by feel, and always with a little something extra you couldn’t quite identify but absolutely couldn’t forget. She’d lean forward at the dinner table, and suddenly you were there, in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn, or on a bus ride that changed everything,…
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Ethical Promotion: Five Cases That Prove Selling Can Be Honorable
A former coworker once told me, with complete sincerity, at a lunch table full of people, that he would never date anyone who worked in marketing. “It’s just so sleazy,” he said. “Choosing that line of work says a lot about a person.” (I was young. It stuck with me. That sentence lived rent-free in…
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Elevate Your Content’s Impact Using Features and Perks
I once watched a brilliant software engineer spend forty-five minutes explaining his product’s architecture to a room full of potential buyers. He covered the database structure. The API calls. The load-balancing algorithm. The proprietary compression technique that reduced server overhead by 37%. When he finished, a woman in the front row raised her hand and…
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Compelling Video Tactics That Motivate Viewers to Act Now
I once watched a smart, articulate entrepreneur deliver a seven-minute video pitch for a product I genuinely wanted. By minute four, I was checking email. By minute six, I was gone. Not because the product was bad, because the video was a slow, unstructured march through a swamp of unedited thought. Here’s the uncomfortable truth:…
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Channel Your Genuine Enthusiasm to Level Up Your Copywriting Skills
I once got so excited about a content strategy framework that I literally clapped my hands together and said “oh, that’s delicious” in a restaurant. My dining companion looked at me with a mixture of affection and alarm, the way you’d look at a dog who’s just discovered a tennis ball machine. I am not…
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Amplify Your Selling Points Through Juxtaposition Narratives
I once watched a copywriter present two versions of a sales page to a room full of marketers. Same product. Same benefits. Same price. The only difference was the story that preceded the benefits. Version A led with the benefits: “Save time, reduce stress, grow faster.” Version B started with the pain: the late nights,…
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The Architectural Blueprint Behind Copy That Sells
I once rewrote a landing page for a friend. Same product, same features, same price. The only thing I changed was the structure, the order in which the information appeared. His conversion rate tripled. Same bricks. Different house. That’s the thing about persuasive writing that most people miss. They think persuasion is about what you…
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Classic Persuasion Methods Every Writer Should Master
I spent years writing blog posts I thought were useful. I’d pour hours into them, research, structure, careful phrasing, and then I’d hit publish and hear nothing. Crickets. Not a sale. Not a subscriber. Barely a comment. Here’s what I didn’t understand: useful and persuasive are not the same thing. Persuasive writing isn’t manipulation. It’s…